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Looking back at the calendar for October 2016, I can see that it was an unusually chaotic, difficult time, although punctuated by delights. David and I each had significant medical problems. Nothing life threatening, but definite limitations, aches and pains. Our roof developed a major leak, revealing a long-term structural problem. We were in for asbestos abatement, mold abatement, demolition and finally reconstruction, about two months of living out of boxes. On the other hand, late in October I was invited to participate in a marvelous conference at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation: “On the Fierce Urgency of Nuclear Zero: Changing the Discourse”
The meeting was transformative for me. I was liberated from the bubble of familiar faces and places, to be lodged at Charlie Chaplin’s old hotel in Santa Barbara, along with about 20 other scholars, ranging from Noam Chomsky and Elaine Skarry to Richard Falk and Daniel Ellsberg. There was no need to be delicate or didactic, no need to pull punches or appear polite. Thanks to David Krieger and the staff of NAPF, we had a thrilling event, trying to solve the puzzle of why the majority of people on earth seem to be sleepwalking into Armageddon. The title of my talk was “What are the psychological obstacles to nuclear zero?” and for fun, I came up with a list of 50 possibilities, and challenged others to expand the list. The paper I gave is here.
I sensed trouble in advance. I read the polls, and Nate Silver, and I could see how the relentless attacks on the female Democratic candidate were taking a toll. I knew from early childhood, first in Chicago and then in the South, that sexism, racism, and religious bigotry are endemic. In fact, it seemed to me that the South had never really lost the Civil War. Slavery was legally abolished, but habits of Southern thinking and acting never really went away. We vacationed in Yancey County, where alcohol was illegal, and my father took me along to the moonshiners to buy whiskey. The County made liquor illegal as a moral statement, and in so doing opened the market for moonshine. People from Yancy County never forgave Thomas Wolfe, who knows what they think of True Blood? Beneath the genteel surface lies sin and chaos.
The obesity epidemic spread from the South to the rest of the US, and then much of the world. In my mind, at least, the Southern diet was embodied in Chapel Hill schools, circa 1962, before desegregation: mystery meat, potatoes, gravy, biscuits and grey slimy vegetables. Howard Johnson's. There were separate restrooms for black boys and girls and white boys and girls at our school, and restrooms at bus stops and the hospital included four lavatories. Two water fountains. The South, embodied in Red State politics and satirized in True Blood, never went away and I can taste it in the hate filled fact empty rhetoric of the alt-right today
My memories create biases. Somebody bombed my locker in 7th grade because I was the first white girl to share a locker with a black girl. Not a big bomb. Probably more like a firecracker. Nobody made a big deal of it. You had to expect violence with integration. Desegregation meant bringing people together who were not accustomed to it. Guy B. Phillips Junior High School was a war zone. I can recall the smell of my burned jacket as clearly as the taste of mystery meat.
We turned on the TV at 6 to watch the election on November 8, and turned it off by 11. It felt like 9/11 or the day Kennedy was shot. The South had risen again. By virtue of the Electoral College system, the Republican won the presidency even though the Democrat had 3 million more votes. Everything that my family believed in and worked for became threatened that night. It was the start of a protracted Cuban Missile Crisis, still ongoing. 50 years ago it was the Summer of Love, the Human Be-Ins. The Age of Aquarius. Turn on, tune in, drop out. This year it is the US that is dropping out, from the Paris Climate Accords and NAFTA, to the Human Rights Council of the United Nations.
So for the last 7 months I’ve been resisting. Resisting physical pain that seems to be the outcome of having a calcified old skeleton. And resisting dismantling a prosocial globally interconnected society based on planetary interconnection that has been under construction since the end of the Second World War. It’s not so bad to walk with a trekking pole. I went back to knitting and discovered that Resistance takes many forms. For example, on the knitting web site Ravelry.com, within days of the election there was a free e-book called Knitting as a Political Act (by Donna Druchunas) and then shortly a group formed called The Pussy Hat Project, whose results were featured on the cover of Time Magazine, one highly visible aspect of the Women’s March on January 23. Ravelry has a group for almost any cause you can imagine, including knitters for the March for Science, Earth Day, and Black Lives Matter. One group is called “under the spell of an orange cat.”
Something I love about knitting is that everybody has the experience of ripping out your work. Ripping out our stitches has a nickname, frogging, because you rip it rip it rip it. Frogging is just part of knitting, and experienced knitters don’t waste emotion on a bit of frogging once in awhile. Frogging is not a form of resistance, but the opposite. Capitulation to the insight that you made a mistake or misjudgment and need to rip out your work and begin again, better. We submit with humility that our effort just didn’t produce a good enough outcome, and without drama, frog it out and start over.
The social, cultural, and political unraveling in the U.S. today may include some social frogging. Mistakes were made. More mistakes are being made right now. We resist the destruction of beauty and life, and accept (perhaps with sorrow) that other things need to be undone. I will choose to try to accept that beautiful things are fragile, and destruction may be temporary or even creative. Furthermore, resistance is not futile! Not when hundreds of thousands of women with needles march on Washington.
“There are more things to admire in men than to despise,” wrote Camus. I disagree, but mostly with regard to gender. Nevertheless, a species that can self-organize around a fondness for orange cats can’t be all bad.
